Days like this I feel like I am trapped in some kind of existential loop, a la “Groundhog Day,” forced to live and relive excruciatingly painful parts of my life. I suppose it is simply the fact that I really haven’t learned any of the lessons I was supposed to have learned, so I haven’t really learned to avoid these situations that make me want to weep, and maybe even sometimes writhe in agony.

Here I am pondering the chances of actually breaking out of the Black Iron Prison when I am reminded of a quote by Douglas Adams, author of the cult classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (who by the way was an atheist and is a big influence on my philosophies regarding the universe):

I finished rereading Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow by Tad Williams, which has been (like many other fantasy novels such as The Sword of Shannara and The Wheel of Time series) compared much to The Lord of the Rings. While there exists much older literature that could considered fantasy (for example, The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser written in the 16th century), I believe that it was Tolkien that allowed booksellers to actually have an entire marketing category devoted to such stuff.

I think I just realized that it’s not the loneliness itself that’s getting me down. It’s the fact that I’m starting to dread the future. I can’t get rid of this idea that I’m on this doomed path that’s leading to nowhere, and that things are at best going to remain forever unchanged and unchanging until I die, but more likely, things are going to get worse.

Watching the Disney redub on the Cartoon Network right now. I still think it’s pretty cool. The first time I watched it was as a fansub in 1999, I think. I don’t know if being in the original Japanese makes it just seem more epic or something, although at least the Disney version doesn’t have any cuts like the first dubbed version which most Miyazaki fans find completely abhorrent.

Just pondering Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow still. I think I thought this the first time I read it, and I’m not usually the gushy, romantic type, but I think the thing that sticks the most with me is the relationship between Simon and Miriamele and how painstaking Tad Williams actually fleshed out its nuances. I think my most favorite scenes are when Simon and Miriamele head out on there own to return to the Hayholt in their bid to try to stop the Storm King and to prevent the End of the World, and they have to seek shelter in people’s abandoned houses, and I was struck especially by the scene where she is doing common, domestic things that you wouldn’t expect a princess to know how to do (not that I’m suggesting that that’s women ought to do)—there is a sort-of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves quality to it. I guess the mundanity of it all really struck me, and how what moved that section of the plot along was the developing romance between the two characters. For some reason, these scenes actually seem to capture the sense of Home for me (which also happens to be a major theme in this book.) Whereas Tolkien touches upon the fact that “you can never really go home again,” particularly when he turns the Shire into a totalitarian state, Williams reiterates the (admittedly disgustingly trite) idea that “home is where the heart is,” which may or may not actually represent an physical place. In retrospect, I suppose maybe Tad Williams had the same idea that I did when I read Book IV and VI of LotR: how different the scenes would’ve been if Frodo and Sam weren’t both male (or, I suppose, alternately, how different it would’ve been if J.R.R. Tolkien wasn’t an old school Catholic and had tried to tap the homoerotic side of it all) and indeed I do find it very touching.

OK, I admit it. I’m weird. But I’ve been reading up on the Roman Empire lately for no good reason. (Maybe it’s because it’s Holy Week, and I’ve been thinking about Rome and it’s relationship to Christianity, specifically Roman Catholicism.) And you know that saying, “All roads lead to Rome”? Well, with all the driving I’ve done this week going home and back, I’ve realized that all freeways lead to Los Angeles.

As I was driving to work this morning, I thought about how it’s been a while since I’ve been up to the Bay Area and how long it’s been since I’ve seen my friends from college. Immersed in this reverie, I almost passed my exit, and I thought about just driving all the way up the I-5, past L.A., down into the Central Valley, out to the Bay.

On one of my therapeutic albeit expensive trips to the bookstore, I was arrested by a book entitled Undoing Depression. What I found unique (in comparison to the many books about depression that I have browsed through) is that the author writes as someone who simultaneously helps other people with their depression, being a psychologist. At the same time, he is dealing with his own problem. He is a fellow sufferer, and yet he does have some practical suggestions that might help. It’s a lot more cheering than various books that describe the author’s depression simply from the point-of-view of suffering (and on occasion, overcoming it.) Mainly, this is because the author has the other perspective of taking care of people who are depressed. And it works better than all those books written by people who may never have been depressed. While they say things that are really no different than what the author of this book says, the fact that they don’t identify as a sufferer of depression makes it, I think, harder to swallow. But maybe that’s just me.

I am randomly scouring the net. You’d think that using del.icio.us would satisfy my need to bookmark random sites that I will likely never visit again (a technology that I wish had been available when Netscape had first come out—you should’ve seen the madness of my humongous bookmark file.) Alas, that is not to be. Of course, a sideblog would probably work better, but, I’m too lazy to write code right now.

One of the concepts in Perdido Street Station is “crisis energy.” From what I understand, it is a magical energy created from crisis situations that ends up acting in opposition to what seems inevitable. For example, one of the possible applications discussed in the book is the act of flying. Let’s say you cast yourself aloft by throwing yourself off a balcony. If you have a crisis energy engine, the impending catastrophe of splattering on the street below ends up propelling you upward instead. The higher you go, the more catastrophic your plunge downward would be, the more crisis energy is generated.